On ignorance

There were a couple of us at a party last night, Bush, talking about ignorance. My interlocutor made the point, rightly, that you don't win too many hearts and minds by calling other people ignorant. True enough. But I heard also that he was faulting the Democrats, in their recent election loss, in part for implying that folks on the other side were ignorant. And in part, too, because they lacked a leader who could put out their vision/version of the truth. Everything, he seemed to be saying, is opinion--and the power with which it's held.

Some truth there, certainly. But my point was that ignorance is ignorance. No matter what your opinion of the war in Iraq, for example, for or against, it's ignorance to believe--no matter with what intensity--that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, as many Americans continued to do despite evidence to the contrary. Including, it seems sadly, your Vice President. It's ignorance to believe, as many did, that Saddam was directly involved in 9/11, and that he and Al Qaeda were in cahoots. Even the evidence coming from your own people points the other way.

But your election team, Bush, played on that ignorance. Your passionate supporters among the media--in television news and on talk radio--promulgated and perpetuated that ignorance amongst your voters.

Passionate belief, as I see it, is not a useful substitute for honest knowledge. Creationism, for example, is not the equivalent in its truth quotient to evolution. Sorry. To dismiss decades of diligent and rational scientific inquiry in favor of belief--no matter how profoundly held--is willful ignorance. I have no desire, Bush, to diminish those beliefs. Those who hold them are good people, for sure--but in this instance they have chosen the path of ignorance. And their choice, in my view, diminishes even the God they believe in. How much greater and more complex the mind of a creator who ordains the process of millennia than one who accomplishes the whole shebang in seven days. Well, six, if you knock off the day of rest.

What's wrong with ignorance? It leads us, Bush, to make bad, uninformed choices. It leads us into hasty commitments--to go to war, say--that thoroughly researched knowledge might have kept us out of. It encourages us to pursue paths that bring nothing but misfortune to the world. And allows us stubbornly to believe ourselves right, even at those times when we have made a terrible mistake. Ignorance, Bush, has consequences, and none of them are preferable to the consequences of informed knowledge.

Have a good Sunday.